


Second Loves

by windfalling



Category: Green Lantern: The Animated Series
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-02
Updated: 2013-02-02
Packaged: 2017-11-27 20:46:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 655
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/666327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windfalling/pseuds/windfalling
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-<i>Lost</i>. Razer grieves, dreams, and remembers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Second Loves

**Author's Note:**

> I marathoned half the series today and became inconsolably miserable after watching the most recent episode. I will probably return to that emotional state after the next one, but for now, this was strangely cathartic.  
> for the prompt: you cannot save people. you can only love them.  
> AU as of "Cold Fury."

They pull him into the ship and everything is chaos: Razer ignites with rage and breaks free of the construct, Kilowog lunges and restrains him as he tries to go back, Hal yells in vain above the noise. The anger that had powered Razer’s ring so long ago is incomparable to the grief that wracks his bones and tears through his veins, to the fury that threatens to shatter everything around him. It takes both Kilowog and Hal to stop him and remove the ring from his finger; the moment it slides off and the armour around him fades, so does his rage when there is nothing to channel it through.

"What's gotten into you?" Kilowog growls, his rumbling voice booming through the room, now silent. "Where's Aya?"

Razer runs his hands through his hair, fisting them at the back of his head to keep from shaking. When he does not answer, Hal turns away, pressing buttons, saying her name, over and over again.

"She's gone," Hal says.

Razer closes his eyes.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

At first he'd denied it: she looked too much like Ilana, she was a robot, she cannot feel.

He isn't sure when things changed, when Ilana morphed into Aya in his mind, when he found himself missing Ilana less and less, until it was only a dull ache, and the anger was replaced with faint nostalgia. Aya might have had Ilana's face, but she was different in all other aspects. She was a machine, but he had felt her hand on top of his in sympathy and seen her shoulders still and tighten when she was unhappy. She had expressed emotion, not simply because she had learned how to, but because she could feel -- and these things, he knew, were not calculated.

He had never thought that she could have felt anything for him in return.

Her last words had been those of regret, and it is those words that plague him now.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

He stops sleeping.

Kilowog has a talk with him once, gruff and well-meaning. Razer knows he understands, perhaps more than anyone else on board, but no amount of empathy or kind words or meditation will help him move on.

"Can't sleep?" Hal asks when he finds Razer, still awake.

"No," he replies, short and clipped, not bothering to tell him that it isn't that he can't sleep, it's that he doesn't want to. In his sleep, she dies every time.

For him, the most terrible ones aren't the ones where he relives it all over again, hearing her scream, seeing her enveloped in light and fire, touching nothing as she disintegrates. No, the worst are the ones in which he imagines everything differently.

In his dreams, he knows the feel of her mouth against his, the uncalculated movements behind her response. There are some things he does not have to imagine, like the feeling of her fingers entwined in his, or the weight of her body when he holds her. But things are different in his sleep, where he shows her the rest of his home, where he teaches her how to dance, where he watches her listen to the sound of music, where he hears her laugh for the first time, where he memorises every new expression she makes.

No matter how many times he changes things, the result is the same. It doesn't matter how it begins: only how it ends.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

Aya dies. Aya dies in a flash of bright light and fades away in his arms and there is nothing left of her but fragments and his memories and an imagined kiss.

He'd said _I love you_ , had pressed her close to his chest as if holding her would keep her together, but it would never be enough. Whatever promises he might make, however many times he says it, it will always be too late.

 

 

 

-

 

 

 

The next time he says them, it will not be as goodbye.


End file.
